A two deck metagame is impossible in equilibrium unless they have an exactly 50-50 matchup (or, more realistically, you're not in equilibrium because people have pet decks, archetypes they refuse to play, etc)

@ajfirecracker I mean, you answered it. The Vintage metagame can't currently reach an equilibrium with Shops both due to player preference and due card availability. That's the reality in which banned and restricted decisions need to be made.

"One key to the continued health of Magic is diversity. It is vitally important to ensure that there are multiple competitive decks for the tournament player to choose from."

So your view of the metagame is something like "Shops is clearly the best deck, but Shops doesn't see that much play due to card availability, but despite not seeing much play Shops shapes the rest of the metagame to prevent otherwise worthy decks from seeing play" ?

@ajfirecracker No. My view of the metagame is something like "Shops is clearly the best deck, but Shops doesn't see as much play as it should in an 'ideal' metagame. This prevents normal metagame dynamics (i.e. people maindecking hate) from being a viable solution to the deck, leading to an unbalanced format in which Shops consistently has an elevated win rate (60% so far) compared to the rest of the field."

My mentioning of Eldrazi was that people misevaluated Shops's role in the current metagame. Rather than a foil to "unfair" strategies, the current aggro build functions as Affinity in that it's best against "fairer" strategies. The people saying "restricting Thorn of Amethyst killed Eldrazi" are simply wrong. The deck saw little play because of Shops even prior to restriction - we just have more data from Champs that confirms it.

"One key to the continued health of Magic is diversity. It is vitally important to ensure that there are multiple competitive decks for the tournament player to choose from."

The people saying "restricting Thorn of Amethyst killed Eldrazi" are simply wrong. The deck saw little play because of Shops even prior to restriction - we just have more data from Champs that confirms it.

Forgot to mention this in the SMIP thread: Steve said that Eldrazi had a good matchup against Shops and that's why it saw play last year. I may be wrong, but I remember it being quite the opposite. Am I wrong? I really don't remember but I vaguely recall it being something like 75/25 in favor of Shops. (or was that record against White Eldrazi and not Colorless?)

Shops was almost 80-20 against both White and Jacodrazi. I think the notion that Jacodrazi has a favorable Shops matchup came from @JACO himself when he played it at NYSE. However, Shops decks were incredibly different then. They were more prison oriented and their manabases were strained by Thought-Knot Seer, so the 9 Waste effects and Null Rod were enough to exploit the fragile manabase. Foundry Inspector and the move to a more streamlined deck made this strategy much less effective.

"One key to the continued health of Magic is diversity. It is vitally important to ensure that there are multiple competitive decks for the tournament player to choose from."

Shops was almost 80-20 against both White and Jacodrazi. I think the notion that Jacodrazi has a favorable Shops matchup came from @JACO himself when he played it at NYSE. However, Shops decks were incredibly different then. They were more prison oriented and their manabases were strained by Thought-Knot Seer, so the 9 Waste effects and Null Rod were enough to exploit the fragile manabase. Foundry Inspector and the move to a more streamlined deck made this strategy much less effective.

For the record, his deck premiered at NYSE IV, where Shadows over Innistrad was the most recent set. This was long before Kaladesh block, Foundry Inspector, Walking Ballista, etc.

I don't have it broken down into White and Colorless Eldrazi for this one, but the majority of decks were Jacodrazi (42 to 20). Also, Foundry Inspector and Precursor Golem saw almost no play (5 of 40 Shops decks with 3.4 copies of Inspector and 2 copies of Precursor Golem in the entire event. What a difference a year makes...

"One key to the continued health of Magic is diversity. It is vitally important to ensure that there are multiple competitive decks for the tournament player to choose from."

@winterstar Not sure how much hyperbole it is though. If you can think of how many cards are sheer brokenness without the need of set-up (yawg will needing a full grave, for example), you have lotus, ancestral, trinisphere, bazaar, sol ring, maybe tinker. Workshop is certainly more powerful than a mox as it is +2 mana instead of +1. Sol ring is useful across deck types, but is only +1 mana the turn it's played. Mana crypt gives you the +2, but at the cost of just killing yourself with bad flips. Memory Jar isn't nearly as broken without 4 shops or tinker. Bazaar can be just as powerful as workshop in that the deck built around it uses it in a similar fashion (cheating mana). I think a lot of those cards mentioned can be lumped near the top, but it could easily be debatable which cards you list in your top 3 on raw power of the card alone.

The fact that Workshop pins you to playing an artifact deck is really no hinderance at all. If any other land could add +2 (let's say for example thorn, sphere, golem, juggy, jar, trini, tangle wire, smokestack, etc. all cost -2 from their current cost), you'd have every deck of any color utilizing those cards. As I said in an earlier post, it's not that shops forces players to play artifacts - it's that workshops give players ACCESS to higher costed artifacts that would definitely be played in other decks with the -2 mana adjustment that Workshop provides.

Consider for a minute if thorn/sphere cost 0 and tangle wire cost 1 (with the offset of the 2 mana extra shops gives you). Are you telling me decks like dredge wouldn't run those? Would blue NOT play jar (even without tinker) if it only cost 3? Would aggro decks not love a 2 mana juggernaut? Granted, you won't ALWAYS have workshop in an opener (just like you won't ALWAYS have ancestral, FoW, bazaar, X-card-name-here), but as a 4-of, it happens regularly enough that it can be a +2 mana in the opener a LOT. Even if you draw it turn 3, jar is now a turn 3 play whereas it's turn 5 if you play any other land.

@winterstar It's not hyperbole. There is no crusade. Lots of players want the card gone. Even some of the world's top MTG players of all time want the card restricted. This is reality. Workshop is completely overpowered and it's time to stop giving cards free passes.